Rain welcome

"The rain will be worth a lot more to the district than what the damage has been I think, except for odd spots - there's been some quite severe storm damage just in very localised areas but overall it's just what you call light damage," he said.

Mount Gambier received the most rain over the past day, with 31.2 millimetres.

Belinda Gibson from the weather bureau says good rainfall was widespread across the state.

"I guess also good news is over in the Riverland they picked up around about 18 to 20 mm. Yorke Peninsula generally around about 10 up to 20 mm. Eyre Peninsula perhaps not so high at the stage, some of the inland locations only look to pick up the 5 mm or less," she said.

More storms and rain predicted during Tuesday are not expected to be as severe.

Uni flooding

Among the hundreds of flooding-related call-outs in Adelaide was one for a Uni SA building in Frome Road in the city, where stormwater flooded the basement.

Greg Howard from the Metropolitan Fire Service (MFS) says the clean-up will take some time.

"The building's approximately 70-80 metres long by about 30 metres wide so I'd suggest we'd be pumping water for most of the day," he said.

"Then they're gonna have to get all the mud and debris out as well so there's a lot of water damage."

David Scarce from the MFS says water was about 2.5 metres high by the time emergency crews arrived.

"All of the doors are swollen so they've all had to be smashed to get into all of the rooms so there's quite a bit of structural damage in the way of doors and door frames in the basement and uni property, all of the fixtures and fittings that were in the basement have all been damaged by floodwater and mud," he said.

Uni SA says some researchers and students at the Reid building will be set back by months in their research because of the flooding.

Some rats and guinea pigs drowned in the nutrition research building basement, but many other animals survived because their containers floated.

Tourists stranded

The publican at Marree, Lawrie Kalms, says up to 100 tourists have been unable to leave the outback town because of dust storms.

He said 28 people had been due to fly out and nearly 50 were due to leave by coach.

But he says they will have to stay in Marree until the dust settles.

"We just had a plane went up this morning before it [dust] started and it didn't even get to the lake and it turned around and come straight back and landed and flat out finding the airport to land," he said.

'It's just the dust - you can't see so no-one is going anywhere at the moment."

It's a fundamental human yearning to be a part of something bigger than one's self, and maybe that's what drove my mate Ash to die, far from home, in a bloody foreign war against Islamic State, writes C August Elliott.